June 01, 2011

Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992): C+

Though brimming with overripe sexuality and photographed with an eye toward operatic horror-cinema iconography, Bram Stoker’s Dracula remains a feast for the senses that fails to satisfy the heart, libido or mind. Working from his source material’s general narrative template, Francis Ford Coppola shoots for gothic grandeur via a variety of formally sumptuous tableaus. Many of his sequences are fit to occupy permanent residence in one’s imagination, be it a prologue in which Transylvanian warrior Vlad (a sensually sinister Gary Oldman) returns from a red and black-silhouetted battlefield to curse God (and court bloodsucking damnation) for his beloved wife’s suicide, an episode featuring the elderly Count – his face now white, his hair in creepy bonnets – scurrying across the side of his castle’s outer walls, or the sight of a fair maiden being ravaged by the vampire (in wolfman form) in a misty nighttime courtyard. Whereas his imagery proves memorable, however, his story’s plotting is misshapen, failing to decide upon a consistent focus – the plot veers madly between Dracula, Jonathan Harker (Keanu Reeves), his fiancé Mina Murray (Winona Ryder, deftly balancing Mina’s initial innocence and Vlad-inspired passion), and professor Van Helsing (Anthony Hopkins) – and bogging down in one scene after another that boasts little suspense or surprise. It’s a film fit to be a lavish coffee table book, which would ably capture the action’s beautiful (if ornamentally excessive) aesthetics while sparing us Hopkins’ tepid hysterics and Reeves’ deadening blandness.